Hate Is the New Love

On Monday night at the Nokia Theatre, Caetano Veloso performed with the three young musicians who, in 2006, recorded the album “Cê” with him. The music on “Cê” is more or less 4/4 rock, and is unlike the bulk of Caetano’s work, which is diverse but eventually returns to the rhythms of Brazil: samba, bossa nova, forró. After performing a song from “Cê” called “Odeio”—which could be a slightly restrained Strokes song if it weren’t for the Portuguese lyrics—the band left the stage. Smiling, Veloso sat down on a chair with an acoustic guitar that someone had rushed out and handed to him.

The entire crowd had sung along with the chorus, “odeio você, odeio você”—which means, as he explained, “I hate you.” He then told an anecdote about his friend the author Jorge Mautner.

The first time I played him that song, he cried. The second time I played him that song, he cried. He told me, “Just when you get to the chorus, when it is at its most emotional, the music becomes more tender.” And this is because saying “I hate you” is perhaps the most intimate way of saying “I love you.”

Veloso went on to play two songs that are more easily classified as tender. First, he played “Coração Vagabundo,” a bossa-nova song he wrote and recorded first with Gal Costa, in 1967, and then, in a version similar to Monday’s, as a sublime solo performance for a self-titled 1986 album, his first American release. Afterward, Veloso played “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” the unbearably light ballad by Tomás Méndez that Veloso has been playing live since 1995. (Veloso’s best-known performance of the song occurs in the middle of Pedro Almodovar’s 2002 film, “Talk To Her.”) As always, it’s best heard when it’s just Veloso’s nylon-stringed guitar and his effortless, pitch-perfect falsetto. On Monday, the song ended on a long, sustained “Ooooooh.” Veloso made the notes disappear by backing away from the microphone as he sang. Then the lights faded.